


Forth from the Garden

by kitestringer



Category: Harry Potter - Rowling
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-04-25
Updated: 2010-04-25
Packaged: 2017-10-09 03:40:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,688
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/82638
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kitestringer/pseuds/kitestringer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Merope contemplates her escape.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Forth from the Garden

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for _Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince._ Many, many thanks to [](http://maverick4oz.livejournal.com/profile)[**maverick4oz**](http://maverick4oz.livejournal.com/) and [](http://rustler.livejournal.com/profile)[**rustler**](http://rustler.livejournal.com/), for comments and encouragement, and to [](http://kaynyne.livejournal.com/profile)[**kaynyne**](http://kaynyne.livejournal.com/), for lending me her "Britpicking" expertise. :-)
> 
> Originally posted in August of 2006 for the Summer Flinging Challenge on LJ.

The heat that summer was of a kind Merope couldn't remember ever having experienced. It drew the air from her lungs like a sponge draws water, and each day it chased her out of the cottage and into the shady parts of the garden, where she spent hours upon hours tending to her plants. The soil was rich and damp and cool in her hands, and the herbs growing there were tender and green and didn't seem to mind the terrible heat at all.

Nearly two weeks had passed, since the man from the Ministry had come, before she had finally been able to accept that she could do as she pleased — that she could sit in her garden all day and all night if she wanted, and no one would bellow for their dinner or for the washing to be done, no one would grab her from behind and tear her clothes or pull her hair or pinch her until she screamed. The house was still filled with echoes of her father and brother — their foul, petty magic, the lingering mustard-brown-grey of their auras, the smell of them — but they themselves could no longer touch her. The thought of them sitting helpless, magicless, in dirty prison cells made something sing inside Merope she'd never heard before.

'Am I very evil?' she asked the olive and black snake that frequently wandered into her garden. It had now been three weeks since her own family had been whisked away by strangers, and it felt as if nothing less than a heavy curse had been lifted.

'I know nothing of such things,' it told her, 'but you don't seem so terrible to me.'

She smiled and said nothing; she knew very well the way these creatures had always lied to and flattered her brother. Reaching between the folds of her dress, she found a little frog hiding there; she held it out, and the snake snatched it away, leaving two legs wriggling outside its mouth. She watched with curiosity, waiting for them to still, but the snake swallowed the other half as they continued to twitch. The snake's aura fused briefly with the bright red one of the frog inside it, then turned a contented leafy green. It wrapped itself in a neat coil, settling in to watch Merope as she worked.

Her deadly nightshade had been telling her for two days that it was ready for its first cutting, but she'd been waiting until her favourite potion had nearly run out before giving in. The leaves had to be kept fresh and green for as long as possible, and they would wilt quickly in the stifling heat. Last night, though, she noticed she was down to her last phial. With a flick of her wand, thirteen stems were severed at once, falling gently to the ground. She rolled them up in a length of parchment and tied the bundle with a piece of string.

'Why are you doing that, then?'

Merope glanced up at the snake. It had been getting more and more curious each day, asking her this and that as she went about her gardening. She knew it liked to be fed from her hand and didn't care about much besides that, but she didn't mind the company.

''s for a potion. Makes me able to...see things, like.'

'You can't see without it?'

'Not everything.'

One day she had mistakenly added powder of adderwort _before_ instead of after the angelica leaves while making noctuoculaserum. That night, instead of seeing clearly in the dark, she saw the brilliance of all the life around her, like the stars in the sky had come down to meet her, the colour and light of a thousand insects, mice, bats, spiders, even the ghosts of where people had been, the Muggles who travelled up and down the road each day, leaving their accumulated traces in trails of filmy luminescence. It was beauty the likes of which she'd never seen or even dreamed, and she'd never gone without the potion since.

The snake's green glow was now tinged with orangey gold — desire for food without true hunger, something she saw in her brother all the time. She plucked a fat worm from the soil and fed it to him, and his aura turned the colour of emeralds.

With a slight shiver of excitement, she crawled out of the shade to where the trees thinned out, near the remnants of the crumbling stone wall that used to line their property. There, out of cracks between the stones, grew the bushy tufts of pink valerian flowers, now in full bloom, and she selected several clusters to pick by hand. These she wanted to feel between her fingers as they were pulled free of their roots, to feel the weight of them resting in her palms and come away stained with their pollen. These would become part of a pearly potion whose steam would rise in perfect spirals, one that would smell like earth after a soaking rain and the clean scent of her future husband.

Every day she watched him ride by, her only real remaining concession to her old routine, her old life. Sometimes he rode alone; other times, a man who might have been his father rode with him. Still other times there were girls with him, giggling and touching his arm, and Merope felt every curse she knew fighting its way to her lips and her hand clench her wand until she thought it might snap in two. Most times he was in a carriage, but sometimes he simply rode his sleek chestnut mare, and these were her favourite times — when he wore tall brown riding boots and looked like the prince in a Muggle picture book she saw once in town.

But from where she crouched watching him in the garden, she could almost never see his aura. Even in the low light at dusk in winter, he had almost no glow; just a dull grey she could see only when he was framed just so against the dark sky. In blinding sunlight, she saw nothing coming from him at all. Never had she come across a living creature quite like him; she thought he must have a dull, unhappy sort of life for his aura to look that way, maybe even as bad as her own.

She squirmed as a bead of sweat trickled down her back. The sun had climbed high in the sky, and the breeze was like a scalding blast of air from an oven. She moved away from the wall and back into the shade. For a moment, she fell into a brief panic and thought "I'd better begin dinner," and then she quickly remembered she could eat whenever she pleased, or not at all, if it suited her. Her sharp laughter startled the snake out of its tidy coil.

'I'll be leavin' here soon,' she said, burying her face in two handfuls of soft, pink flowers. 'You'll have to hunt for your own food.'

The snake stretched out lazily, its tiny ribbon tongue flicking the hem of her skirt. 'Why should you want to leave your home?'

Her home. She looked up at the old cottage where she'd been born and where, until just a few weeks ago, she'd been sure she'd die — the mossy stone, the crumbling roof, the film of dirty magic draped like gauze all around it. The way it drove light away, or maybe the way light wanted to stay away all on its own.

'I'm getting married,' she answered, the words rolling comfortably, naturally off her tongue. 'Me and my husband, we can't be stayin' here.'

'I don't know what all that means, but it sounds terrible.' The snake wound its body tightly through a nearby bramble. 'What if you go to a new place, and there isn't any nice food there?'

Merope smiled, thinking of Tom Riddle, of white teeth and crisp clothes and strong, clean hands. 'Everything will be nicer there, don't you worry.'

Off to her left, the hyssop plants swayed gently, asking for attention. After her father and brother were taken, she'd thought of using the flowers in a cleansing ritual, one that would have filled the cottage with fragrant steam and scrubbed away the dark magic that stuck to the walls like old grease. She'd quickly realised, though, that they should be saved until the next full moon, for a much greater purpose. Why bother making the house more pleasant when her father would be returning to dirty it again before autumn? No, she had something else in mind.

Long ago, she'd realised that if hyssop flowers picked during a full moon found their way into her father's tea, a simple spell muttered into the steam would make him more likely to agree to whatever she asked (though she was likely to get cuffed on the head for asking in the first place, so she saved it only for very important occasions). At the next full moon, these flowers would join the valerian in the most important potion she had ever made, would ever make in her life. A potion, she thought proudly, she'd half invented herself. She might not understand everything she saw in her father's mouldy old potion books, but she understood enough, she thought, and she knew her herbs.

After watering all the plants that were thirsty, she lay back in the grass and stretched. She could fall asleep like this, if she wanted, and no one would stop her, no one would know or care. All there was left to do today was to wait for the sound of a horse to reach her from the road, the distinctive clip-clop she'd long been able recognise no matter what else might be distracting her. She closed her eyes and imagined the day, a day so close now, when she would be with Tom Riddle. Together, away from this sad, dingy place, they would live — really live, both of them — and she would make him shine like another star in the sky.


End file.
